Hollywood movie mogul STEVEN SPIELBERG has invented technology he calls "the future of cinema" - and he promises the new film experience will suck audiences into the heart of the action.

The SAVING PRIVATE RYAN director is working on advanced screening technology, but insists he is looking to build on the things that made cinema great in the past, rather than altering it forever.

He tells the Hollywood Reporter, "A good movie will bring you inside of itself just by the sheer brilliance of the director/writer/production staff.

"But in the future, you will physically be inside the experience, which will surround you top, bottom, on all sides.

"I've invented it, but because patent is pending, I can't discuss it right now."

i could make many silly comments here, but seeing the performance and output of Hollywood the last few years, i believe my hightlighted comment will encompass it all.

paintmered

10-12-2005, 09:34 PM

What is IT? A Segway? ;)

http://media.southparkstudios.com/media/images/511/image_09.gif

ochre

10-12-2005, 10:35 PM

He was a day late. He's talking about the new video iPod and pirated telesync day zero movies.

savafan

10-17-2005, 10:38 AM

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16937824-13762,00.html

STEVEN Spielberg, the most influential visionary in US films, is involved in patenting what Hollywood has been dreaming of for decades - three-dimensional movies that can be viewed without using special glasses.
Spielberg, who pioneered the blockbuster with Jaws and computerised special effects with Jurassic Park, believes the technology for plain-view 3-D films has finally arrived.

In an interview with a Hollywood trade magazine, he let slip that he was involved in patenting a system that puts the viewer into the film - "inside the experience, which will surround you top, bottom, on all sides".

If the technology wins acceptance, it will revolutionise cinemas, forcing them to tear out their traditional screens and replace them with giant plasma screens specially adapted to project Spielberg's 3-D images.

This could revitalise the film industry, which is faced with declining audiences and fierce competition from rival mediums such as advanced video games.

But there is one big question: will it work? Filmmakers have been experimenting with 3-D since 1903, and there have been a succession of over-optimistic claims that it is about to become a mainstream technology.

The first screening of a 3-D film for a paying audience came in June 1915 when a short film, Jim the Penman, was shown in New York featuring scenes from rural America. It was treated as a novelty and forgotten.

In the 1950s, there were more claims that 3-D had arrived with the releases of Bwana Devil, which depicted attacks by maneating lions, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. But the format failed to take off.

Hollywood tried again in 1983 with Jaws 3-D, the third of four films about killer sharks. It famously ended with the shark's teeth emerging from the screen and going for the audience.

The film was a flop - and since then even pornographers, obvious potential beneficiaries from 3-D, have been scared away by the technical issues and cost.

The key problem is that so far all 3-D formats needed viewers to wear glasses with a red filter for one eye and a green filter for the other. Some people find these cause headaches and disorientation. Doing away with the glasses is crucial to taking 3-D into the movie mainstream.

Spielberg's timing may be right - several big electronics manufacturers have recently demonstrated plasma screens that can project 3-D images visible to the unaided eye.

One of them, Opticality Corporation, recently demonstrated a 3-D screen that was 4.5m wide and 3m high - approaching the size of a cinema screen. It is believed Spielberg's potential patent describes a way of adapting such technologies to operate on the larger scale.

The essential requirement for all 3-D viewing is to create two slightly different images from any given scene and then project one into the left eye and the other into the right eye.

Until now this has been done using two cameras to film each scene. The two sets of images are then projected simultaneously, but the coloured glasses worn by viewers mean the left eye sees the images from one of the films while the right eye views the images from the other. This fools the brain into thinking it is seeing a three-dimensional scene rather than a flat screen.

The new technology uses the same principle, but instead of two cameras it uses a powerful computer to split each image as if it were being seen from different perspectives. These images are then projected simultaneously out of the screen at different angles, by subdividing the screen with tiny strips of filter material.

Spielberg and other directors have been seeking a 3-D breakthrough for years. He recently linked up with James Cameron, the director of Titanic, still the most financially successful film in history, and George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, to lobby US cinema managers to prepare for the "3-D revolution".

Lucas and Cameron are keeping their options open. Lucas has announced plans to produce 3-D versions of all six Stars Wars films. Cameron is making his next film, a science fiction epic provisionally called Battle Angel, in 3-D. However, all these will still require the dreaded glasses.

In the end, technology may not be enough. Peter Guber, the producer of such films as Batman and Rain Man, said of the effort: "People don't go to the movies to admire the computer technology, the zeros and ones, but for the oohs and the aahs. Successful filmmaking always comes down to the fundamentals - a good story well told."